3D For Your PDA? NeoMagic Thinks So

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SAN JOSE–ATI Technologies and NeoMagic Corp., the former leaders of 3D graphics, have taken their 3D expertise further into the set-top box and even the PDA.

At the Microprocessor Forum here, both ATI and NeoMagic described system-on-chip devices that could be used to attack the market share of National Semiconductor Corp., whose integrated Geode chip has quietly moved into Web pads and some set-top boxes.

After successfully introducing the Rage TV chip last year, ATI has moved on to the Xilleon 220, a chip for set-tops based upon a MIPS core. “We obviously needed to have a CPU, and MIPS was the de facto standard in the set-top box industry,” said Dan Eiref, director of set-top box marketing and technology for ATI, Thornhill, Ontario, in a separate interview.

Eiref said an Intel X86 CPU was not considered. “For low cost set-top boxes MIPS has been the architecture of choice,” he said.

Instead, the need for Linux was more important than the choice of a CPU. The Linux OS supports the MIPS architecture, he said, and all the applications network operators will need.

Perhaps the most important feature of the Xilleon family is its dual display-PVR capability. The chip integrates support for two inputs through an off-chip tuner and demodulator, and has a separate video scaler engine for each video output. In a nutshell, network operators can deploy one set-top box and serve two independent televisions.

“If you can buy one box instead of two you can save a bundle of money,” Eiref said. “That’s one box, one installation, one hard drive (for personal video recording), which can save up to $200 for the network operator.”

Set-top designers can use two implementations. A low-end box can use the integrated 300-MHz 32-bit MIPS core as both the control and video processing CPU. A higher-end box can bolt on a discrete CPU for controlling the operating system and higher-end applications. Not surprisingly, a basic 2D/3D graphics core has been included; Eiref did not say which of ATI’s graphics chip portfolio was represented.

Pricing was not disclosed, although Eiref said he was confident that a typical $100 bill of materials in a set-top box could be cut in half.

ATI outsold its rivals in the desktop graphics controller space up until this year, when Nvidia Corp. claimed the sales crown. Likewise, NeoMagic Corp. also owned the mobile graphics space two years ago, before giving it up in favor of a renewed focus on embedded systems-on-a-chip featuring embedded DRAM.

NeoMagic, however, appears to be going after a juicier prize: the nascent market for 3D applications in handheld applications. The NeoMagic MiMagic NMS704x chip also integrates a MIPS CPU in a nod to performance, although an ARM embedded CPU has typically drawn less power.

“We want to bring living-room functionality to a handheld device,” said Syed Zaidi, a designer of the chip for NeoMagic, Santa Clara, Calif.

At the heart of the chip is a MIPS32 4Kc embedded CPU, running at 100 MHz and processing 130 Dhrystone MIPS. Currently, the chip is fabricated upon a 0.2 micron process, embedding from 4 to 16 Mbytes of DRAM within an internal module. Most importantly, the chip consumes only 75 milliwatts of poweralthough the figure should jump to 800 mW if the 3D core is turned on, Zaidi estimated. Currently, only a 2D core has been included.

The miMagic chip also contains 3 USB ports, and outputs to both a CRT and LCD. A touch-screen interface has also been included, as has two joystick ports.

Externally, the chip supports up to 512 Mbytes of memory, including 9 memory devices or two cartridges including game or memory cards. An AC’97 codec interface provides audio via an external codec.

Finally, the chip will contain a 3D engine. Although NeoMagic exited the graphics market before it designed such commonplaceand power-hungryfeatures such as hardware transformation and lighting, basic 3D functionality including triangle setup, double buffering and 16-bitrendering is supported, including a 16-bit Z-buffer. Support for trilinear filtering, vertex fog and specular highlights are also included, as is source alpha blending.

The company’s roadmap includes process shrinks to 0.11-micron through 2004, and the integration of such functions as biometrics and voice recognition.

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